SOUTH KOREA’S president slashed trade to impoverished North Korea and pledged to haul Pyongyang before the UN Security Council, vowing yesterday to make it “pay a price” for a torpedo attack that killed 46 sailors.

South Korea hit back over its torpedoed warship today by suspending trade with North Korea in a move aimed at crippling the regime financially.

South Korea’s president said his nation will no longer tolerate North Korea’s “brutality” and said the regime would pay for a surprise torpedo attack that killed 46 South Korean sailors.

In the face of world-wide condemnation North Korea today claimed damning evidence that it torpedoed a South Korean warship was fabricated.

South Korea’s foreign minister said today it was “obvious” that North Korea sank one of the South’s warships in March, killing 46 sailors.

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak vowed today that his country would respond “resolutely and unwaveringly” against those behind the sinking of a naval ship near the tense maritime border with North Korea.

A NORTH Korean mine may have caused the explosion that sank a South Korean naval ship near a disputed maritime border, the defence minister told lawmakers yesterday.

South Korean quarantine officials are to slaughter 273,000 poultry after an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, the agriculture ministry said today.